For many months now I have sat down, in a holy attempt to understand the difference between slave trade and medical practice in sub-Sahara West Africa, and Nigeria as a case study What was our crime? That we were the most brilliant set of beings to grace the planet Earth? Let me rewind.... I came out of academy as not just the best of my kind but a state icon, and a mathematics consultant but when I gained admission into medical school, I realized I was just one of them, and not the only one. A time came I was missing between the sands of intellectual waterfalls and the need to delineate a niche for myself. The desire to save the dying man continued to fall in aliquots. Now, let me take a correct tangent in my bid to project the congenital woes of a black doctor in a black land....where do I start? A doctor spent 7years in medical school studying the pathology and appropriate therapeutics in helping to settle the dilemma of health-debtors! We were trained as disease detectives and illness prosecutors armed by Hippocratic principles and practices.....but guess what? I met a system which was probably designed by one crazy individual who has no life outside the corridors of the hospital Firstly, the average doctor in Nigeria works for about 300hrs a month! You don't believe this right? You come to work by 7am, leave after 5pm.... in other specialties such as pediatrics or surgery, it is by 8pm if you are so lucky not to have system failure. As if that was not enough punishment, we now created a midnight punishment for ourselves called call duties! That arrangement is life-shortening! Let me make a comparative analysis: Nurses run shift. What does it mean? They have three set of workers. The first set work from 8am-2pm, the 2nd set work from 2pm-8pm, the 3rd set work from 8pm till morning! And they always come in minimum of 2 nurses per shift, so that they take turns to sleep during the night. Those on night shifts for one week will go for off for the next one week. Off means that they won't come to work within one full week! We don't run shift, as doctors, in fact we take calls.... meaning, you come to work by 7am to do pre-rounds, run the day's work till 4pm, then start the call from 4pm till 8am the next day and God help you, you may be the one handling the ward and emergency....if you are a sinner man, a bad case will just hit your station at 7.45am, meaning, you won't bath that day as you must join post-call review by 8am till 9am then start rounds and continue with Secretariat duties till God knows when. In the facility where I found myself, we will now start post-rounds, after which you will start documentation. In the department I find myself, calls is not enough, you also have the dreaded weekend call that runs for 48hrs Saturday morning till Monday morning......and when you want to talk, the elders who have gone ahead will say, “we did it too”, “you are not the first” and I begin to question the rationale of perpetuating slavery.....simply because somebody pushed you through it, your inferiors must suffer it too. Secondly, we were using folders, and was saying that the system was not efficient, the hospital management now complained that files were missing....instead of defending our forth, our fathers accepted that we will not only document during rounds but must sit and type it into the system.....hence we were made secretaries by all means Can I shock you? The ward attendants, orderly or porters, as the case may be, in the hospital were employed primarily to assist the nurses and not you....so she owes the white garment girls more loyalty. The Nightingale girls were employed to assist the doctors by nursing; but is that what is currently obtainable? They studied in the University for 5 years, they passed mathematics, yet after writing prescription, you need to still update treatment sheet. Here you have to calculate the dosages as if you are talking to a learning preterm! You need to explain in details how the drugs should be given! All transactions entered by our fathers to allow peace reign in the ward If our tale of many woes ended with nurses, I won't be worried....now patients’ relatives are tired, and the all-doing doctor must become! You hear statements like: get that investigation result from the lab, I don't care how you do it, but get it! So you start chasing shadows....simply because our fathers could not face patients’ relatives and tell them to do the needful. Now we do urgent PCV, micro-ESR, RDT, ARV testing, even phlebotomist in the labs expect us to take blood samples and send it to them The white man seeks to make life easy, their medical practice is not a near disaster like ours. Only in Africa that a house officer will be turned into a multi-parameter machine....to measure vitals including BP every 15mins and RBG every 30mins while blood is given in 5mls aliquot over 4hours. May God forgive who created this slavery.
